Olive Tree Announces the Qumran!

We at Olive Tree are announcing the release of a new Qumran (non-biblical scrolls) module. The discovery of thousands of documents and fragments thereof, known as the Dead Sea Scrolls, at Khirbet Qumran beginning in 1947 is the greatest archaeological discovery related to the Bible in modern times. Dating from 250BC to 70AD, the Dead Sea Scrolls have been of inestimable importance to scholars and students in a variety of fields, most especially Old Testament studies, New Testament studies, and Second Temple Judaism. They have cast light on myriads of historical, theological, literary, sociological, and philological matters.

The Dead Sea Scrolls contain a variety of types of documents. Well-known among them are our oldest copies of the Hebrew and Aramaic Old Testament books (by approximately one thousand years), but they also contain commentaries on Old Testament books, fascinating theological treatises, documents on community living, and more. This new module contains virtually all of the scrolls with the exception of the copies of Old Testament books.

The electronic database of Qumran texts was prepared by Marty Abegg, Jr., the Ben Zion Wacholder Professor of Dead Sea Scroll Studies at Trinity Western University in Langley, BC, Canada. Dr. Abegg is one of the world’s leading Qumran scholars, so his work is of the finest quality. Moreover, Dr. Abegg has tagged the database for morphology. Thus, you can click on a word to see its lexical and parsing information in the same way that you can for the Hebrew Old Testament (BHS) if you have our BHS Add-On—Groves-Wheeler Westminster Hebrew Morphology module. You can also get a quick sense of the meaning of the lexeme from a gloss, also provided courtesy of Dr. Abegg. If you have the BHS Add-On module, then you can even click on a link to the appropriate Hebrew or Aramaic entry in the well-respected BDB dictionary if there is an entry in BDB for that lexeme.

Our Qumran module takes advantage of our recent work in shifting to Unicode encoding for Hebrew and Aramaic in our BHS (HMT) and BHS Add-On—Groves-Wheeler Westminster Hebrew Morphology modules. That means that you will see our Qumran texts with stunningly sharp, aesthetically-pleasing Unicode “smart-fonts” that are geared toward maximum readability. Our Qumran module also contains scholarly editorial marks, almost always the same editorial marks with which you may be familiar from the Discoveries in the Judaean Desert (DJD) series. Finally, searching capabilities are provided via our familiar search screen.

We at Olive Tree are excited about this new module! We hope you will check out the product description here.

~Drayton B.

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This entry was posted by Daniel S on January 4, 2008 at 4:52 pm, and is filed under What's New?. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0.Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

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